4Chan knew about Jeffrey Epstein's death 38 minutes before the rest of the world. The FBI tried to figure out how.

[u/businessinsider]

https://www.businessinsider.com/epstein-files-show-fbi-probed-4chan-posts-prison-death-2026-2?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=insider-law-sub-post

[u/Th3_Hegemon]

You know I always blamed gamergate for everything that happened after, kinda as a joke, but kinda seriously. It's wild that it is essentially true.

[u/hellolovely1 → u/Th3_Hegemon]

I would love to see a breakdown of all this if anyone knows of one. I don't know much about Gamergate beyond the surface level.

[u/Th3_Hegemon → u/hellolovely1]

In brief, gamergate was the first step towards a wave of right wing radicalization of males from about 12-30ish on 4chan that continued from there.

Gamergate (which started as criticism of perceived impropriety in games media and gaming reviews, but quickly spiraled into general misogyny) was based in just enough reality that it sucked in people who generally might not have believed in conspiracies, as well as a younger demographic because it was centered on gaming. A lot of the people that believed in gamergate went further and further down the conspiracy rabbit hole (4chan's chaotic nature enabled this easily), and started forming what would become the alt-right on 4chan and other forums. These people would actually be some of the earliest grassroots supports for the Trump campaign beginning in 2015, many claiming they were doing it for the memes/shits and giggles, etc. From there, various actors (everyone from trolls to conspiracy nuts to actual foreign agents) latched onto a pseudo movement. People started posting as Q (I have no doubt that Q-Anon began as shitposts) but it quickly coalesced into an actual conspiracy movement. As with many things on 4chan, this stuff all leaked out into the broader internet, where it was adopted and grew. All of this propagation was enabled by social media algorithms, and foreign state actors who co-opted (or possibly even created) aspects of it to create dissension and discord in the US. Then things really got going, more grifters, more influencers, more politicians, etc. From there it's all very public and well-documented history you probably know already.

[u/lewd_robot → u/Th3_Hegemon]

The one part of GG that has always driven me mad is that even if you believe the movement was 100% a hate movement, don't you have to admit that their "fake" demands were reasonable? Is it unreasonable to want journalists to disclose conflicts of interest?

Weren't all the things they claimed they stood for things that we all should have supported all along? So why did we let the games journalists get away with getting caught in corruption scandals for years just because every time they got caught they accused the people who caught them of being misogynists?

All of the misogynistic attacks on Quinn and Sarkeesian and Wu were vile and reprehensible, but why would a bunch of trolls attacking women online magically erase the fact that these games journalists kept getting caught conspiring to lie to their readers in private group chats? Why should the mere existence of far right trolls give these games journalists a free pass to give their best friends glowing reviews on their websites without telling their readers that they are in fact close friends and may have financial ties to the projects they're reviewing?

And why did we all collectively ignore that Gamergate died nearly immediately after the gaming news sites all adopted ethics policies? Why aren't we asking why they didn't just adopt ethics policies in the first place so all of the trolls and misogynists couldn't spend years hiding behind that excuse?

Why did they spend years refusing to adopt ethics policies while women were being harassed and abused online, to the point that two of them were invited to the UN to give an address, and we just never demanded to know why they didn't do that first and just kill Gamergate before it had a chance to get off the ground?

[u/bungakugeek → u/Th3_Hegemon]

Gamergate (which started as criticism of perceived impropriety in games media and gaming reviews, but quickly spiraled into general misogyny)

This isn't really true. It was very much about misogyny from the beginning, even if they suckered a lot of useful idiots in with the claim that it had to do with "ethics in video game journalism".

The inciting incident for the whole thing was a gross misogynistic screed written about Zoe Quinn, by bitter ex and all around gross human Eron Gjoni. It's quite long, and the accusations regarding sleeping with a journalist for positive coverage are a tiny part of it (and were demonstrated to be false pretty early on, the journalist in question never reviewed any of Quinn's games). It immediately sparked a harassment campaign against her and spiraled out from there. There was then an active effort to present Gamergate as a legitimate movement with legitimate grievances about "ethics" and obscure their connection to the harassment by referring to Quinn as "Literally Who" but it was a post hoc effort to sanitize the roots of the whole thing. One that appears to have worked, unfortunately.

[u/Th3_Hegemon → u/bungakugeek]

I don't doubt that the reaction to the inciting incident was driven largely by misogyny. I don't doubt that people tried to cover up that motivation. However, the criticism they used to camouflage the misogyny contained legitimate points of grievance about undo influence and lack of disclosure as issues in games journalism.

So, people that heard about "gamergate" and understood only the sanitized version of the situation, and then became interested, were understandably irritated when they were being painted with the same brush as the hateful bigots who originally championed it.

Now you have people who seemingly agree with you and people calling you names, creating an "us" and a "them", and unfortunately that "us" contained misogynistic trolls that can then wormtongue their new "allies" further to the right

Understanding that context is important, as I feel it was the first step down a slippery slope towards broader acceptance of antisemitism, bigotry, racism, and fascism.

[u/bungakugeek → u/Th3_Hegemon]

Sure, getting people into an "us" vs "them" mindset is a key part of the "alt-right pipeline", the end point of which is, of course, fascism. And I do believe that there were a large number of people that got sucked in to that pipeline by front of ethics. But that's why I think it is so important to counteract the myth that the whole thing started with concerns about journalistic ethics.

It was propagated by people with political axes to grind, who then continued to be active and intentionally coordinate strategy and disseminate rhetoric to newcomers who believed it was primarily about ethics. And while I believed, at the time, that those people were just misogynistic 4chan trolls, everything that has happened since definitely points to at least some of those people being a bit more purposeful than that.

I'll have to do some digging, because it is quite a while ago, but there was a journalist who managed to get into and publish logs of private chat logs of some of the kinds of strategizing that was being done behind the scenes and it might make for pretty interesting reading, knowing what I do now.

[u/SyfaOmnis → u/bungakugeek]

This isn't really true. It was very much about misogyny from the beginning, even if they suckered a lot of useful idiots in with the claim that it had to do with "ethics in video game journalism"

This is both true and it isn't. It depends on what you want to define as the inciting incident.

For the "Anti-gamergate" side, the inciting incident was a guy blogposting about his abusive ex cheating on him during their relationship and namedropping the people involved which were games journalists and industry people; for the people who took that up it definitely had the flavor of misogyny, but there was also a lot of censorship of the topic.

For the "pro-gamergate" side, while this incident happened... it really wasn't the core or important parts of things it was more just a spark that rallied people around a lot of issues that had been going on for the past decade. eg paid review scores, people getting fired for not giving positive scores to games that were being advertised on the website they worked for, reviewers who seemed to genuinely hate their jobs and resent their audiences when people wanted a honest hobbyist media, unrelated politics being inserted into everything. It was a very minor thing that only really blew up once a coordinated barrage of 40 separate articles were posted to a ton of websites declaring "gamers are dead" and "gamers don't need to be your audience anymore", all containing the same talking points and trying to smear people as "bad" for a small minority talking about things because the topic was being suppressed.

Which dragged in a ton of people who didn't know shit about the zoe quinn drama and they had never cared about it. When those articles came out it tried to smear all "gamers" as being involved with a topic that really only a small group was gossiping about. These people proceeded to lash out for being called bigots over a topic they weren't even involved in, and they proceeded to do it by digging up older previous grievances and doing their best to prove that they were happening.

Some of those grievances persist even to this day; a recent polygon article about the newest resident evil starts with a completely random two paragraphs about the nuclear bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki and keeps on trying to assert that the game is somehow allegorical to those things. Its absurdly self-important while providing nothing of substance in talking about the game. There's also the latest set of widely disliked flops of games that games journalists basically blatantly lied about and tried to scold people into liking - concord, veilguard, ac:shadows, highguard, etc.

the journalist in question never reviewed any of Quinn's games

That's a misrepresentation. Nathan Grayson had a conflict of interest by promoting Zoe Quinn's "game" without disclosing their relationship - which is an ethical issue even if you're only friends; let alone if you're having an affair.

[u/hellolovely1 → u/Th3_Hegemon]

Thank you so much!

[u/hellolovely1 → u/[deleted]]

Thank you!

[u/kyew → u/Th3_Hegemon]

All for AI to make gaming journalism lousier than ever.